Page:Notes and Queries - Series 9 - Volume 10.djvu/125

 9">s.x.Aca9,i902.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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stable of Scotland, who was present, as Sir Walter records, is mentioned by Horace Wai- pole as " the noblest figure I ever saw " ; he was 6 ft. 4 in. in height, and towered over all the others. In 1773 Dr. Johnson and Boswell visited him at Slains Castle in Aberdeen- shire, and went to see the Bullers o' Buchan, not far distant. His father, Lord Kilmar- nock, had been, after trial in Westminster Hall, beheaded for his share in the rebellion of 1745. At the coronation of George III. a valuable jewel fell from the crown, but was afterwards recovered. It was said to foretell the loss of the United States of America.

An old friend of mine, who died some dozen years ago at the great age of ninety, told me that he remembered, when second master of Westminster School, Queen Caroline trying to force an entrance into the Abbey at the coronation of George IV., 19 July, 1821, and attempting to enter at the great west door, and again from the entrance to the cloisters, but, of course, in vain. Only some six weeks afterwards she died, and the populace re- sisted the attempt to smuggle the corpse quietly away. The same friend witnessed the burial of Mrs. Garrick, in 1822, in the same grave with her husband in Poets' Corner.

The Rev. John Dymoke claimed to be styled the Honourable the Champion, but there was always a strong doubt as to whether the office could be held by a clergyman. He died at Florence, and was cremated on the same day. It does not seem to be recorded whether the Champion's steed was " barbed," heraldically speaking, and it would also seem that the office conferred the honour of knight- hood, or ought so to have done. The Cham- pion ought to have worn the gilt spurs as " eques auratus." JOHN PICKFOKD, M. A.

Newbourne Rectory, Woodbridge.

I observe that Canon Lodge, in his ' Scrivelsby, the -Home of the Champions,' 1894, p. 110, says that, "as a matter or fact, the challenge never has been accepted, al- though there have been occasions when the sovereign's title might have been fairly ques- tioned." That the Champions were never really intended to be anything more than faineants is probably true, but Mr. Cuming reminds me that at the coronation of George III: the Champion's gauntlet was picked up, apparently by an old woman, who made her escape without detection. Jesse, in his ' Memoirs of the Pretenders and their Adherents,' ed. 1860, p. 356, makes allusion to the event, and the story is worked up into a powerful scene in Scott's ' Redgauntlet.'

Mr. Cuming remembers -a long conversation he had with Prince John Sobieski Stuart respecting the challenge, and the prince assured him that they had no record in their family as to who the person was who picked up the gauntlet, but they were positive it was a man in female guise.

J. HOLDEN MAG'MlCHAEL.

SIR ARCHIBALD ALISON'S RECTORIAL AD- DRESSES AT ABERDEEN (9 th S. ix. 427). Since I sent a query on this subject I have found in Alison's ' Autobiography ' an even more inex- plicable statement. On p. 35 of vol. ii. he writes of his election as Rector by the Glas- gow students :

" The installation took place in the University

Hall on the 15th January, 1852 The speech which

I delivered on the occasion, and which is printed in the volumes of these -University orations, was very well received."

Will it be credited that his installation took place not on 15 January, 1852, but on 27 Feb- ruary, 1851, and that not merely was his address not printed " in the volumes of these University orations," but that there were no such volumes in which it could have appeared, the latest collection of Glasgow rectorial ad- dresses having been issued in 1848, three years before Alison spoke ij^ Glasgow? The "calm conviction of his own merits" which Mr. Leslie Stephen attributes to the historian of Europe is amusingly in evidence on almost every page of his 'Autobiography.' If his Aberdeen and Glasgow rectorial addresses were not really reprinted, it is abundantly obvious that Sir Archibald thought they de- served to be. P. J. ANDERSON. University Library, Aberdeen.

BOUDICCA : ITS PRONUNCIATION (9 th S. x. 64). If the "new orthography of an old friend" is to be pronounced as if in Portu- guese, as MR. PLATT says, I must remind him that there are no diphthongs in Portuguese (vide Wall's 'Grammar'), and that both vowels are pronounced, though the stress is laid more on one than the other, generally on the first. The second one is something like a chateph vowel in. Hebrew. Thus, to express it typo- graphically, the river is pronounced Douro, and though the pronunciation may be so slurred as to sound like Dooro, the u is dis- tinctly audible in the speech of educated persons. E. E. STREET.

CAPT. MORRIS'S WIPE (9 th S. x. 67). Sir William Stanhope had three wives first, Mar- garet, daughter of John Rudge, of Wheatfield, co. Oxon, and had issue a daughter Elizabeth, who was the first wife of Welbore Ellis, Lord Mendip; secondly, Mary, daughter of John